essential living Being, or noetic Animal, which contains within it Ideas of all the living creatures and Archetypes of the four elements ( Tim.30b); it is a completely coherent archetypus mundus, timeless, ungenerated, immaterial and pefect matrix of the psychic and physical cosmos; for Plotinus, it is a well-rounded-whole, composed of individual intellects, or noetic lights; ‘a globe of faces radiant with faces all living’ ( Enn.VI.7.15).